Golden Tales of New England (book review)

by Richard Subber | May 18, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, Language

“…I feel a goneness…

Book review:

Golden Tales of New England

May Lamberton Becker, ed.

New York: Bonanza Books, 1931

378 pages

Writers used a different kind of language to create feel-good stories in the 19th century. In Golden Tales of New England, May Becker selected a feel-good sample of 17 of them.

You’ll recognize some of the authors: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe…

The other writers might be new for you, as they are for me, like the offering of Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse.” It’s an authentic, ample exhibition of New England patois and sturdy New England character. Meet “Mandy” and “M’lindy,” two aging sisters who were born Amanda and Melinda, and who were fated to share their living, mostly at a distance but, in the end, so inescapably together.

Here’s Amanda sadly recounting her sister’s death: “I guess I’ve got through…[Melinda] went an’ married that old Parker, an’ then she up and died. I wish’t I’d ha’ stayed with her longer; mabbe she wouldn’t have died. She wa’n’t old; not nigh so old as I be…I feel a goneness that I never had ketch hold o’ me before…”

Doesn’t that passage pluck at your heartstrings?

Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley” is a dainty adoration of a venerable lady who never gave up being a Tory during the Revolutionary War, and persisted in being the almost ghostly guardian of Province House in Boston after the British departed.

The other Golden Tales are equally exotic morsels of what entertained the citizens of the Republic long before television and Twitter.

Try some of them.

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